3 Latest News Breaks in Emerging Tech – Sept. 8, 2014

Corinna Underwood has been a published author for more than a decade. Her non-fiction has been published in many outlets including Fox News, CrimeDesk24, Life Extension, Chronogram, After Dark and Alive.

According to Gizmag, Nico Nijenhuis from Clear Flight Solutions has created a cast of robotic falcons. The Robobirds are designed to eliminate nuisance bird flocks, which eat crops, fly into the pathways of aircraft, or forage at landfills in large numbers. The realistic looking birds flap their wings to fly, just like the real thing, allowing them to maneuver through problem areas and chase away smaller birds. The robotic raptors are controlled remotely by an operator on the ground. The developers claim that targeted bird populations quickly learn to avoid what they perceive as natural predators. This model is 23 inches long and has a wingspan of 47 inches. It can reach up to 50 miles per hour in flight. Designers plan to make the next Robobird model autonomous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YGpcrDGCzA

Contractor Builds 3-D Printed Castle

Three days ago, iflscience reported that a general contractor from Minnesota built a small concrete castle using a 3-D printer. The project took Andrey Rudenko a little over two years to complete. First, Rudenko had to develop a 3-D printer that could extrude concrete. He designed the structure himself. The small castle is approximately 3 meters by 5 meters. While using 3-D printers to construct housing is not new, particularly in poverty-stricken areas where inexpensive housing in needed quickly, Rudenko’s structure is unique because of its architectural detail. Rudenko plans to attempt larger-scale, 3-D buildings.

Fully Functioning Organ Grown Inside a Mouse

News Discovery reports that scientists at the MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have reprogrammed cells inside the body of a mouse and grown them into a fully functioning thymus gland. To grow the gland, scientists took fibroblasts from a mouse embryo and boosted their level of the protein responsible for the development of the thymus. Those cells were then combined with other types of thymus cell. The complete thymus gland was able to function just as well as one that had grown naturally. It was even able to produce infection-fighting T cells. This is a great advance in regenerative medicine that could, in the future, lead to lab-grown organs, which would replace the necessity for donor organs.

Related posts (5)

Imagine the convenience of being able to measure your household's use of water, find out why your smoke alarm is going off when you’re not home or check your insulin level, all with an app on your smartphone.

Engineers at a Georgia Tech laboratory have created a robotic arm that can be attached to amputees, enabling the technology to be embedded into the human body. The robotic arm has motors that can power to drumsticks. The first drumstick is manipulated by the musician's arms and electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The second stick is tuned into the music being played and is able to improvise.

According to Palmer Luckey, founder of the renowned OculusVR, the future of neurogaming is practically upon us. Neurogames involve a combination of technologies that incorporate the player's nervous system into the game itself. The technology may include items such as EEG headsets, brain wave sensing and eye movement tracking devices and heart rate monitors. Throw virtually augmented reality into the mix, and you have a fully immersive gaming experience previously impossible. Developers of PrioVR just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to produce a full body tracking suit, which enables a gamer to explore a virtual world.

Swiss researchers at the EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) have developed a robot that can see objects thrown at it and reach out and grasp them. The robotic arm is 1.5 meters long. It has seven joints and a four-fingered hand. Its built-in cameras give it "vision," and its computer produces a mathematical model of the object's projected course. The robot is able to rapidly change position to grab hold of the object, such as a water bottle or ball. The team, headed by Ashwini Shukla, a researcher at the EPFL, have taught the robot how to reach in several directions and co-ordinate its arm and fingers. They hope that the robot will be of use retrieving debris in space.

One of the latest trends in the arena of mechanobiology is a micro-pump designed to autonomously deliver insulin in response to an individual’s glucose levels. Developed by Samudra Sengupta and his team of associates from Pennsylvania State University, the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, the device is self-powered and is capable of the autonomous delivery of small proteins and molecules in response to biological stimuli, according to phys.org.

Stay Ahead of the Machine Learning Curve

At Emerj, we have the largest audience of AI-focused business readers online - join other industry leaders and receive our latest AI research, trends analysis, and interviews sent to your inbox weekly.